‘Tainted’ Victory

I’m doing updated plans and budgets for Pajamas this weekend, and one thing I’m doing (which I typically do) is adding a line for “contingency.” For something relatively inchoate, I’ll typically budget 35% above expenses for contingency; as the projects mature and we get more control over what’s going on, I’ll lower it to 15 – 20%.

Sometimes it’s enough.

But the fact that I do that, and that that’s an intelligent thing to do in most cases, is a reflection that we all understand the contingency of things – that futures depend on present-day events that we don’t completely control.Some of those things are just outside our imagination and control – “unknown unknowns” as they say. The outside world doesn’t often behave as we expect it to, and so we build in reserves of various kinds to cope. Some of those things are things we expect, but hope to avoid. Employees will misbehave, projects will fail, critical vendors will demand payment early and critical customers will make payments late.

I’ve been fairly successful in many of the projects I’ve run because I expect these things to happen, and budget for them. That doesn’t mean I want them to happen, or that I don’t spend lots of energy working to keep them from happening. But I expect to fail sometimes in my efforts.

No one who succeeds in the world, after all, expects perfection in the real things they do. Good systems and good people who operate them are good exactly because they expect imperfection, and can compensate for it and still achieve the goals they set.

V-E Day — a Soiled Victory; A look at the WWII Allies’ moral shortcuts.

His litany is a familiar one to anyone familiar with World War II history: strategic bombing, the killing of innocents, the compromises with bloody Stalin to check bloody Hitler. But his conclusions are surprising – or ought to be, and sadly, are not.

None of this is intended to detract from the valor of the millions of Allied service personnel who lost or risked their lives in World War II. Nor is it to deny that the war had to be fought to rid the world of two of the most evil empires in all history. There is a moral difference between Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The Axis cities would never have been bombed if the Axis powers had not launched their war of aggression. And the Axis powers would have killed even more innocent people had it not been for the determination of the Allied powers to prevail.

Nevertheless, we would do well, this V-E Day, to face some harsh realities about the nature of the Allied victory — if only to remind ourselves about the nature of all wars. To win World War II, we joined forces with a despot who was every bit as brutal a tyrant as Hitler; we adopted tactics that we ourselves had said were depraved; and we left too many of those we set out to liberate firmly in the grip of totalitarianism.

For all these reasons, the victory we commemorate needs to understood for what it was: a tainted triumph.

The notion that it is ‘tainted’ – that we have acted throughout our history less than perfectly, sometimes awfully and therefore our history is tainted – underscores much of the thinking that I criticize in looking at ‘Bad Philosophy.’ It suffers from two defects in particular: it fails to ask tainted as compared to what? and it searches for and emphasizes commonality between the bad and the good by abstracting to a high level.

The first question – as compared to what? – is a critical one. I genuinely think that some people somehow believe that the world is a lab where perfect wars can be fought, or perfect legal cases made – or perfect businesses run, or perfect marriages maintained, or children can be perfectly raised. And if you can’t – if in retrospect, your parents damaged you, or the business execution was clumsy, or if a war was fought by soldiers who were on occasion brutal or if decisions were made in weakness, fear or anger that were – again in light of historical omniscience, bad – then the whole enterprise is certainly subject to question and certainly shouldn’t be celebrated.

Sadly, the legitimacy and social cohesion that societies need to ‘work’ come in some part from celebrations of their history, as awful and imperfect as it may be.

Ferguson may not care about social adhesion for this society; he may view it as beyond redemption and look forward to its collapse. He may not understand the role of history, particularly in a society like ours where ‘blood and land’ are not the roots of our self-understanding.

I do understand the role of history, and have no romantic notions about wiping our culture from the planet.

I’m not blind to the errors made and acts that can’t today be justified in World War II. But I understand them differently. I see men and women who were fallible, afraid, exhausted, enraged, and who did the best they could and whose best was thankfully damn good. I look at their mistakes as opportunities, not to criticize them from the safety of my position of retrospection, but to try and learn how we can – as we fumble through our own fallible, contingent history – learn.

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32 thoughts on “‘Tainted’ Victory”

Good post AL. The danger in an article like this is that when you are out to prove some ‘greater truth’ you tend to ignore evidence pointing the other way. Its silly to try to judge the actions of nations fighting for their survival by todays standards. The mentalities are completely different.
One thing that comes immediately to mind is a big reason the Soviets absorbed so much of Europe. The Americans were utterly suspicious of _British_ intentions in Eastern and Central Europe. Not many leaders were as farsighted as Churchill after all. Anyway, during the Italian campaign the Brits were pushing hard for a Southern or Balkan front. Eisenhower put his foot down and insisted the Normandy and Southern France campaigns would be the focus (to Stalins relief no doubt). You have to remember this was the age of Colonialism, and America had always been suspicious of European ambitions. Sometimes trying to curb one problem leads to another.

Speaking of which for any wargame fans, try Hearts of Iron 2. It lets you play basically any country in the world during WW2. Speaking of unintended consequences, playing the British I made an end run across Scandinavia to keep the Soviets out of Central Europe. Only to discover in the mean time they had taken Italy. Oops.

Well, as compared to what Niall or anyone else cares to imagine. That slippery fish will always get away since the joy of being human is that we get carried away by our imagination. Imagine what you like, and then compare everything to it.

I am vexed by what has become of heroes. It has become common to defrock traditional heroes by exposing them as mere mortals, capable of corruption and vice — Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, for example. As we let the pigeons deface our statues, we may have a better idea of our heroes’ humanity — hopefully, that understanding can make their heroism less fabled and more tangible. But it seems that there is always an agenda behind hero abasement, which is to mount evidence that what we are and always have been is corrupt and as unworthy of survival as any other culture.

I am not against knowing the truth, but there’s usually an agenda that drives it forward; and too often, it is an agenda to undo our civilization by whatever means.

Ferguson’s retrospective on the United States’ thwarting of two black empires that conspired to strangulate it from the east and the west is compared to the same standard that all of American history is tested against: the imagination of a perfect world.

The scribe of empire, whining about WW 2’s resolution? were we really going to invade
the Soviet Union, with a Labor Govt and a
Rump Democratic Govt. Niall is infuriating at times, because he can be so on point; referrring to the similarities and links between Britsh patrols in the 19th Century NWF and Sudan and today. Yet he writes tripe that piece in Vanity Fair;(which has lately become MoveOn Illustrated comparing Pres. Bush to Henry V,

I’ve added a new post to continue this discussion, from a book on just and unjust warfare and specifically the chapter on the firebombing of Dresden and the use of atomic weapons in Japan. Many of the issues are relevent today …..

I used the link to get to Ferguson’s LA Times piece. I don’t know his writing, and can’t fit this essay into a larger corpus. Taking the essay on its own, though, I’ll dissent from A.L.’s take, and that of most of the comments to this point:

* I agree with Ferguson’s recounting of the facts of WW2, and with his characterization of 1945 as a tainted victory.

That war is close enough that I’ve known lots of people who fought in it (all on the Allied side).
I’ve talked to my uncle, who served as an RAF bombardier on night-bombing runs over Germany. Nobody in the family ever got the story of the paratrooper great-uncle who survived–barely–Arnhem/Market-Garden. He wouldn’t speak about it. My great-aunt survived for seven harrowing years as a Jewish/Catholic shadow in the Sudetenland/Occupied Czechoslovakia. And so on.

A.L. says that the essay suffers from two defects in particular: it fails to ask tainted as compared to what? and it searches for and emphasizes commonality between the bad and the good by abstracting to a high level.

On the first point: you wouldn’t find me, or the relatives I’ve mentioned, or others in my family claiming that the Allies shouldn’t have fought WW2, because our methods were tainted. None of the Western Allies even qualify for the 20th Century’s favorite game, Mass Murder Matchup (Turks/Armenia, Bolsheviks, Nazis, Red China, Khmer Rouge…)

On the second point: regret over the brutal methods we used–some because of cold-blooded knowledge of their effectiveness, others mistakenly–should not be taken as a nod in the direction of moral equivalence. I hope all but the incurably contrarian can agree that the world is a better place because the Allies won. Novels that speculate about “alternative outcomes”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_history_%28fiction%29#Published_alternative_histories don’t make for cheerful reading.

One memoir that conveys the sense of a sliver of the Allies’ war is George MacDonald Fraser’s “Quartered Safe Out Here.”:http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/frasergm/qsafe.htm#ours His depiction of the necessary brutality of the Burma campaign he experienced is not–perhaps–altogether at odds with the picture Ferguson paints.

Ferguson falls victim to the fantasy ideology of Leftists … wars that don’t kill anyone. Absent Superman and the Superfriends, that doesn’t even happen in fantasies.

Actions such as Dresden, or firebombing Tokyo, or invading Okinawa, which caused Allied as well as enemy military and civilian casualties, were done by people in the fog of war, plagued with uncertain information, and operating with the goal of shortening the war and getting the killing over as fast as possible.

In retrospect, Dresden was filled with civilian German refugees and probably not worth the effort to destroy it, but THAT wasn’t known at the time. In retrospect, it was possible to bypass Okinawa and take some smaller, less fortified island closer to Japan. It was possible for the American forces to bypass Japanese strong points and starve/beseige these strong points in Okinawa. Nevertheless the bloody experience of Okinawa (100,000 Japanese military dead, 100,000 Civilians dead, 22,000 American dead, dozens of destroyers sunk, several carriers badly damaged) was instructive and led ultimately to the Atomic Bomb being dropped on Japan.

Even then, surrender was opposed by a coup of dissident officers, and came near to succeeding.

Against the most ruthless military machines in history, the US and UK, along with the Russian people, prevailed. That alone is reason to be thankful for ever for those brave men and women who literally saved the world.

“Ferguson may not care about social adhesion for this society; he may view it as beyond redemption and look forward to its collapse….I do understand the role of history, and have no romantic notions about wiping our culture from the planet.”

Neither does Ferguson. There is no evidence in what he writes that he thinks any such thing.

Why is it, I wonder, that you tack this gratuitous, needless, and intellectually dishonest piece of insulting rhetoric onto what is actually a quite persuasive and rational argument? An argument, in fact, with which I would largely agree.

It really was sufficient to refute Ferguson, and not necessary to kneecap him.

I think this sort of thing comes from the cognitive dissonance that occurs when self-indentified “liberals” undergo selected conservative conversion experiences.

The inconsistency of the new intelectual conclusions with the previous emotional attitude leaves you in a state of perpetual emotional doubt, for which you overcompensate with blots like this on your copybook. Those you disagree with not only have to be wrong, but also base, for you to feel good about what you have to say.

bq. Ferguson may not care about social adhesion for this society; he may view it as beyond redemption and look forward to its collapse. He may not understand the role of history, particularly in a society like ours where ‘blood and land’ are not the roots of our self-understanding.

Stating an opinion, as A.L. did re: Ferguson’s essay, and then inviting comments–this is hardly kneecapping, is it? I’ll suppose that both Niall and Armed are made of sterner stuff. In time, A.L. will defend his critique, or back off it.

You know Joseph, it’s amazing how often my liberal friends turn to psychology instead of argument; it’s a nice way of deflecting the issue but it’s an argument that has become so overused that it – instead – devalues the person who makes it.

Sorry.

In this case, I specifically make the point because the issue of legitimacy and the tacit glue that holds society together is very important to me (as noted, I’ve written a bunch about it) and the kind of argument that Ferguson makes is corrosive to those bonds.

Well, as to devaluing myself, those are the risks you take when you wish to make a moral point and analyse the reasons for a moral failing. If you had made the argument at first as you have made it now, without the rhetorical trope attributing a questionable opinion where there was no reason to, no moral failing would be apparent.

I repeat, I actually agree with your argument, though I think the harm of a little self-criticism in America is minimal and not likely to rock the foundations of our civilization. The fact that we can exercise such pointed self-criticism at all is one of the things I’m proudest of about that civilization. I personally think this results from the lack of nonsense about blood, land, and tribe. Thank heavens.

bq. The Axis cities would never have been bombed if the Axis powers had not launched their war of aggression. And the Axis powers would have killed even more innocent people had it not been for the determination of the Allied powers to prevail.

That’s where the argument ends, AFAIC.

There was sound military reasoning behind virtually every ‘crime’ highlighted – sound, that is, so long as you accept the premise that your people come first. What Ferguson calls moral shortcuts, I’d call getting your soldiers killed.

Ferguson does title his essay “V-E Day–A Soiled Victory: A look at the WW2 Allies’ moral shortcuts.” But when I search for the word you quoted, ‘crime,’ this is its only instance:

“So monstrous were the crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany…”

Ferguson doesn’t paint the Western Allies as criminals, at least not in this piece. He says

bq. We forget all too easily the extent to which our side also meted out death to innocent men, women and children in pursuit of victory. We forget the terrible moral compromises that were the price of winning the war.

And that’s true.

So my uncle the RAF bombardier told me. This notion was at the root of the controversies attending the postwar honors bestowed on Bomber Command’s chief, Arthur Harris.

As I noted earlier, I don’t know Ferguson’s work; perhaps I’m defending a moonbat on one of his better days. I take this piece as akin to one of Victor Davis Hanson’s occasional musings on the mayhem and injustice that inevitably accompany the organized violence of war. Even the “Good War,” and, yes, even the current conflict.

The last century taught some of us that, under certain circumstances, the tragedy of choosing war can be less than the tragedies that flow from choosing the avoidance of war. That concept accompanies Ferguson’s essay; it does not negate it.

I believe Ferguson thinks that Americans have a sentimentalized view of US history that deters us from a better, more interventionalist foreign policy. If that was his purpose in the editorial, the discussion here suggests that he failed.

AL, the brits made good rulers, set aside the fact that just being ruled, is an offence, as rulers went, the Brits was always the more benevolent.

The Brits treated the Indians far better than the Indians treated themselves.

Thanks to the Brits, widows dont get tossed on pyres. there was the child marriages, premature consummation and pregnancy, destructive methods of midwifery, excessive child-bearing, purdah, [segregation amongst the sexes, veiling of the face] child widowhood, prostitution, sexual recklessness and venereal disease, an irrational system of medicine.

bq. “It is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and hang them. Build your funeral pyre and beside it my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your national custom – then we shall follow ours.”
— Sir Charles Napier

Even Gandi himself was a product of British school of law.

And Gandi sure was fortunate his opposition was the Brits, any one else, including the Indians themselves, would have delt with such an upstart by applying a sword to his neck.

Its typical for our public school leftist indoctrinated moonbats of the socialist schools of self hatred to spout the usual anti-western crap.

bq. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY professor Alex Hinton has warned that our government’s prosecution of the war on terror may be causing us to resemble the Khmer Rouge

bq. To negate Hinton’s bizarre analogy, one need only recall the history of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. Hinton, without irony, does this himself.

bq. …. and–oh yes–caused the death of more than 1.7 million of the country’s 8 million inhabitants.

bq. Inasmuch as the U.S. government has done none of the above, in what respect does Hinton think we are coming to resemble the Cambodian mass murderers?

bq. Unfortunately, Hinton’s piece is symptomatic of a disturbing trend in leftist thinking. For a while now, the left has been fond of argument by creative metaphor–Zionism equals racism; pornography equals sex discrimination or even rape; and, more recently, Bush equals Hitler. In this way, a controversial phenomenon is equated with one that everyone agrees is bad. Leftists in the academy particularly favor this show-stopper approach, since they are used to having their theories evaluated not for their objective validity (a hopelessly passé concept), but rather for their creativity.

Been interesting to see the left move SLOWLY, from praise of the Red Hihmers and all the rest of their leftist butchers, to using them in Histerical foamage complete with the Lithium stains around the mouth.

Course, since they have changed not a single socialist policy that led to a 100 Million Murders, and we get only a promise that they wont do any murdering.

I guess we should just trust them. and be amused with they invoke their own old worshipped heros as bad examples.

Looks like projection to me.

Wanna know what a leftist is thinking ? doing ? Pay attention to the words that acompany his pointing finger, they are basically confession by accusation.

The noise about Delay is to cover up for the racketerring by the Hillary campaign etc.

Tainted victory ? Ill agree, I wont assign blame ,(FDR was advised by Traitor/commie spy Alger Hiss, hmmm) ok a little, to have all those christian eastern Europe countries fall under the Rule of Stalins NKVD, to have the Gulag death camp invented to send millions of those eastern Europians off to die in them ….

What Hitler did to the Jews, Stalin did to the rest of them, in far greater number by a factor of 10.

If 6 Million Jews was an example of evil, of what magnatude of evil is 60 Million ?

History has recorded that if Patton had got his way, if we didnt have the USA left helping stalin get Nukes etc….

At Yalta, we consigned 100+ Million to their doom. and Billions litterally to abject suffereing and misery that was its own crime against humanity.

Communism should rightly have been exterminated, before it spread its Holocaust, worse than the NAZI’s by order of magnatude, over so much of the earth.

Great job, AL. May I suggest you consider calling your complaint that of the Unreal Perfection alternative, usually unspoken?

In fact, every since the Left convinced US politicians to run away from Vietnam, they have been pretty good at avoiding the comparison to anything real.

Joseph (?)”though I think the harm of a little self-criticism in America is minimal and not likely to rock the foundations of our civilization. The fact that we can exercise such pointed self-criticism at all is one of the things I’m proudest of about that civilization.”

How many must die in SE Asia before you think the harm of excessive American self-criticism is too much? Weren’t the Killing Fields too many murders? — murders accepted by the Left because they were so busy in ‘self-criticism’ (of Nixon and Reps and America).

The US failed to accept ‘democracy’ and a successful Ho Chi Minh communist Vietnam in 1956, and essentially broke the country in Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin escalation. After that intevention, the decision must be to stay or go. When Kerry / Leftists argued in 67, 68, 71, 73 to go, the results of leaving are THEIR responsibility. And of the whole USA. The worst genocide since WW II; the worst thing the USA has done in my life. The shame we may never overcome — because of too much self-criticism, and the lie of an Unreal Perfect alternative.

Ho Che Mihn murdered his own people with a 5% death quota, they Murdered as many or more than PolPot.

The pro-communist news media covered it up, allowing John Kerry to boast that the perp of crimes against Humanity was the “George Washington” of south east asia.

All you need to do is look at the frothy mouth militance on out own campuses to see how these mass murdering leftist lunch mobs operate.

Once they had their total power over life and death again, we are supposed to think they would be better, this time ?

Look no further than their shrug over mass graves of kids in Iraq. Kids being used for sex toys and live tiger food, fathers fed feet first to plastic shreadder machines, Mothers forced to watch their toddlers have their feet crushed in front of them.

Well I guess you have to “break a few eggs” right?
(Walter Durranty excusing Stalin)

The left want to tell us they are different creatures than those ?

No, the BusHitler moonbats are the same, the same evil as seen all over the world in all cultures peoples and geography.

I dont think the left are deluded, half the time i think its the wolf struggling to stay hidden under his sheep skin.

I initially thought you were jumping in to disagree with Tom grey. I may have been mistaken in this case, perhaps remembering your recent dialog with Jinnderlla lowered my threshold.

What I mean in general, is that you seem to classify people to easily as leftists, your own caricatured composite version of leftists at that. You throw everyone into the same pile no matter on which issue they are left of you, whether it’s the libertarian/statist axis, the libertine/social conservative axis, the atheist/religous axis, or whatever axis.

Dude, a Marxist isn’t the same thing as an animal rights activist! It’s true that some animal rights activists are also Marxists, but not that many!

Before you start throwing around the leftist term, you might try to visualize how the current topic fits into the huge multidimensional Venn diagram of all potential leftist topics. ALWAYS enage the conversation at the smallest intersection of topics (NOT union) possible.

This plays into what a said about the rapier vs. the sledgehammer. You can hit a small topic with rapier. You can’t have a precise conversation when taking the sledgehammer approach.

An example of the the sledgehammer approach that all of your posts take is when you basically equated Jinnderella with the Nazi Dr. Mengele because she supported the development of other human embryonic stem cell lines for purposes of medical research.

You could have focused (the rapier) you arguement of you belief that a human embryo is the same as a fuill fledged human being. Instead, you gave her the how Nazi schtick (sledgehammer). Nothing is gained in a converstation like that.

Oh, another thing. Democrats are not the same thing as Marxist appologists. I’m sure some Democrats are, hell considering the perverse nature of man, some Republicans are too.

So, everytime someone mentions that they support Social Security, don’t assume that they have in any why endorsed the deaths of 192 million people. This also goes for those opposing the Iraq War, ANWAR oil drilling, and SUVs too.

Raymond,
I’m sorry that you can’t see that the distinctions between artificial ensemination and performing involuntary medical experiments on living, breathing people as something worth discussing. Can you see the sledgehammer marks yet?

Could this be why all your posts sound like pre-recorded sermons? Are you here only to preach? If so, then carry-on. You’re doing fine.

However, perhaps you might at least consider breaking up your sermons into smaller, more easily digestible pieces, like Mr. “a” does his. It saves my “page down” button pressing finger.